I meant something like "fraction of the employee's time spent on what the employer considers to be productive/useful work".
Contrast it with a typical salaried job. In such a position, people basically get paid to take bathroom breaks, chat with coworkers, check social media, eat lunch, etc. and they might not even be in the office for the full 40 hours a week. They get to eat up even more resources by participating in benefits like health insurance, paid time off, and pensions. Isn't that such a waste of resources?
By hiring a salaried worker, you are essentially locking all of their work to your company's benefit. A quality gig worker can finish an assignment at your company and go work for your biggest competitor. There is value in monopolizing their value to your organization.
In practice this switching ability isn't true or easy. Sandwich workers in Seattle had to sign non-competes and couldn't go work at other restaurants. There was a lawsuit from the city to stop it.
Same in Massachusetts with sandwich workers, they finally had to make a law limiting no competes even though there had been political opposition to that idea for years.
Companies are attempting to monopolize the employees output, but only pay for the seconds the employee is producing for them
Optimize that ratio, ignore productivity, achieve glory.
That salary work mostly pays a lot more than gig work tells you something about the economic impact of both. Gig work might be more efficient than hourly pay for the same work, but it isn't maximizing overall economic efficiency, it's a middle man capturing more of the value.
But salaried work also needs things like a university degree (mostly). What I'm worried about isn't so much that there will always (or for the foreseeable future) be "skilled" and "unskilled" buckets of labor, but that there's this self-reinforcing loop that creates a permanent underclass of gig workers.
Lots of skilled jobs don't need college degrees, employers just require them because it's convenient filter that doesn't have much of a downside for them.
You did qualify your assertion with "mostly", but IME (I switched from trad salaried employment to FT consulting 2 years ago), there's a lot more money to be made in the latter. You have to deal with more risk and more uncertainty, but in terms of income, the upside is way, way higher.
I get that there is linguistic overlap and some similar conditions, but business consulting is better described as a professional service (like lawyering or accounting) than it is as gig labor.
salary vs contractor is pretty similar to wholesale vs retail. if you know up front that you need a large amount of work from someone over a long period of time, you hire them as an FTE with a salary. the wholesale rate for developer time is much lower than what a comparable contractor will charge you per hour for the convenience of only paying for the hours where they do useful work.
a possible reason why it is uneconomic to give gig economy workers salaries is because the necessary discount would put them below minimum wage.
Efficiency, to me, means getting the same result for less inputs. This could take the form of a less expensive method for performing some work or a higher utilization of existing time / equipment. A lot of these gig employers aren't increasing efficiency they are just shifting costs to unsophisticated workers who don't realize it.
> A lot of these gig employers aren't increasing efficiency
Regarding ridesharing, I disagree. App-based hailing is objectively more efficient and scalable (to lower population densities) than street hailing, and more efficient than privately-owned cars requiring massive, distributed investments in parking infrastructure.
Agreed about app-based hailing being more efficient, but I think it’s not germane to the issue at hand – those same organizational improvements would be seen if Uber classified its employees as employees, or if a city’s licensed taxi providers could get their shit together for a good app.
You realize you have always been able to call a cab in low density areas right? Ride-sharing eliminates the dispatcher. It doesn't change the economics of a taxi service in lower density areas. Those higher costs are shifted to the gig employee. Last I checked a driver doesn't get any extra fee if she has to drive 5 miles vs 500 feet to get to her next fair.
At least until recently these services didn't even seem to help with the utilization problem where drivers would be sitting for periods w/o a fair. At least Lyft now will schedule a drive with their next rider while the current one is in the car.
Marx discussed this thoroughly. The same thing is happening to salaried jobs, just to a lesser extent. This phenomenon was one of his bigger objections to capitalism.
All productive labour is being broken down into pipelined work streams where any individual worker performs as simple and as well defined a task as you can give them, and performs that task all day every day. This increases the economic efficiency of the worker, at the expense of depriving their work life of any meaning and turning them into an unremarkable, disposable, exchangeable cog in a machine.
Pretty much every industry in the developed world follows this trend, including tech.
I can say this absolutely exists in Corp tech shops.
I worked in an environment where the CIO would frequently refer to the tech staff as “the factory”. I often encouraged this CIO and others in the management team not to because it was demoralizing and not true - the work was highly skilled, highly dynamic and not repetitive.
Oh and if you treated tech work like a factory it looked like lots of management overhead, poor execution from low skilled workers, predictable timelines (long timelines), and last but not least higher cost.
We haven't discovered great ways of winning wars or building empire without being inefficient and treating people like pawns.
Our history books don't spend time making us think about the morale of the front line soldiers in Alexander/Genghis Khan/Napolean/Stalin's armies. Instead we have entire shelves of books devoted to the mindlessly ambitious guys at the top of the food chain.
We make Edison an icon and give Marconi a Nobel, but if you know your history, these guys ended up at the top of the food chain because they were ruthless. It hardly mattered what Oppenheimer/Einstein/Feynman thought about the nuclear bomb. Because they were the "factory".
Much like the "factory" of people at the pentagon/wall st/google/facebook etc.
We still haven't figured out a good way to keep "factories" running or expand/defend empires without propping up mindlessly ambitious people. The inequality rates suggest our faith in them is at an all time high.
Our current default method much like the cold war or a chimp troupe, is to keep mindlessly ambitious people at the top of the food chain constantly paranoid about each other. Ofcourse we can do better. But the agency isn't there yet. For example, Facebook could turn into a Wikipedia type entity by tomorrow if the "factory" of workers revolt.
I’m not sure Oppenheimer/Einstein/Feynman would have been referred to at the time as “the factory” nor would I imagine anyone consider their work needing to be highly efficient nor would I imagine anyone would dream the appropriate management style to be to eek out all the efficiency in what they were building.
I don’t disagree with your thoughts on charismatic leadership but the response seems misplaced or slightly off topic.
I think factory management and motive is slightly different than dictatorial/power leadership.
the CIO would frequently refer to the tech staff as “the factory”. I often encouraged this CIO and others in the management team not to
At least he was being honest in revealing management thinking. Worse would be a guy who said the company was like a big family, while planning which kids to lay-off next quarter.
We have some of those too but they are usually junior managers who have a single level team (and likely haven’t had to fire or lay someone off). Org leaders usually have more perspective than to call it a family.
It almost feels like secure salaried positions were actually the abnormal deviation in history, a small island of stability caused by a temporary surge of social democratic politics in the post-Great Depression era.
And these cogs are more and more actual machines, computer or mechanical. I read somewhere that if your job does not consist of some Rube Goldberg like process where you never are doing the same thing more than a few times, then your job is likely to be automated as the machines continue to improve.
A successful path forward for humanity in such a world might involve somehow getting most people to have ownership of the robots that produce what they need/want. A difficult proposition because, if one has the freedom to manage capital one also has the freedom to be conned out of that capital or take on too much risk. It also seems very unlikely at the moment as at least the US's educational system seems to be run by people that think thinking about capital and investing is not valuable or a worthy use of time. Wouldn't it be great if we were all capitalists with an income stream we controlled that could support a minimum lifestyle. If it was supported by mostly robots/machines and not other people, it could be a great outcome for everyone.
Book V of the Wealth of Nations has a long passage about the ill effects of the division of labor (or more specifically, of the constant repetition of simple tasks) on the workers.
Cheers, that was a good read. I'd still attribute the argument to Marx, because Smith doesn't seem to link this effect with the inherent values of capitalism.
Turns out there's also a wikipedia page outlining the history of this line of reasoning:
Contrast it with a typical salaried job. In such a position, people basically get paid to take bathroom breaks, chat with coworkers, check social media, eat lunch, etc. and they might not even be in the office for the full 40 hours a week. They get to eat up even more resources by participating in benefits like health insurance, paid time off, and pensions. Isn't that such a waste of resources?